* Harold Reynolds used his MLB.com blog for a lengthy, stream of consciousness-style rant about ... well, it's a little unclear. The basic premise seems to be that stats are bad, but I'm more intrigued by Reynolds a) thinking that OPS is a hardcore stat, b) using the phrase "clogging the bases" without even a hint of irony, c) touting Dave Kingman as an example of hitters with artificially high on-base percentages when in fact he had a terrible .302 career OBP, and d) apparently boycotting the use of paragraph breaks as a symbol of his stat-fueled rage. Oh, and I'm even more amused by the always awesome Joe Posnanski's attempt to "translate Reynolds' post in 15 steps."
(Note: The preceding paragraph was brought to you without interruption in honor of Reynolds.)
* Both teams went homerless last night for the first time in the 35-game history of new Yankee Stadium.
* The owner's suite at the Rangers' ballpark is being renamed after George W. Bush, who was the team's managing general partner from 1989-1994 before becoming governor of Texas.
* Here's the shirt that all the guys at the SABR convention would wear if we weren't too fat to fit in them.
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The message board thread that apparently inspired the BABIP t-shirt (linked to from Aaron's link to the t-shirt itself) is like a train wreck. I couldn't look away until I'd read the entire horrifying mess.
About 80% of the posters there had no idea what BABIP was, denounced it out of hand anyway, and absolutely refused to learn about it when people tried to explain. The other 20% understood the basic concept, but either (a) were wildly wrong about its implications; (b) were only a little wrong about its implications but severely overstated every point they might otherwise have made, like the one who kept insisting that BABIP for hitters doesn't have anything to do with luck at all; or (c) just didn't know how to explain themselves at all.
It was partly humorous, but mostly just depressing.